How to create your electricity market contract or a standardized factor for electricity costs in Mestro Portal.
This article is part of the agreements module, Mestro's most extensive module with additional functionality. It enables you to tailor your use of Mestro Portal. Contact your Customer Success Manager to discuss how to make the module work for your organization!
In this article I'll describe how to re-create your electricity market contracts in Mestro Portal. The electricity market contract is the fundamental contractual type in the portal. That's why you are able to use it to either make digital versions of your real-world contracts or standardized factor-contracts to estimate costs. Buckle up and let's get started!
N.D.: This article assumes that you have already read the information in this introductory article.
The contract's cost items
Electricity market contract's cost items are generally divided into three categories:
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Fixed costs (SEK, EUR, NOK, etc)
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Per month, or
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Per year
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Variable costs (currency / kWh)
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Carbon dioxide emissions (g / kWh)
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Scope 1 (direct emissions)
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Scope 2 (indirect emissions from production)
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Scope 3 (other indirect emissions), or
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Undefined scope, no scope
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TIP: There's no limitation to the number of cost items that you can create, even if you for example have four different variable cost items.
Fixed Costs
Fixed costs are independent of the amount of electricity used in a property. Examples include subscription fees, guarantee of origin fees and electricity certificates.
Variable costs
Variable costs are dependent on the amount of electricity used and usually denote the price per kilowatt negotiated with the utility supplier. The composition varies from a time limited fixed price, a monthly variable price or a combination of both.
Carbon dioxide emissions (CO2e)
The emission of carbon dioxide equivalents from generation and transmission of electricity. Different methods have different emission factors. For example, wind and water power have near zero emissions, while coal power have a very high carbon intensity. The carbon intensity of electricity purchased is specified by the utility company. You have the option of dividing the emissions into scopes as defined by the Green House Gas Protocol. Read more here (N.D! external link). A simpler option is to use an average emission factor.
Create an electricity market contract anchored in reality
Begin by selecting Electricity Market in the menu New Agreement under the tab Agreements after opening the module. The first section allows you to name the agreement, select a trading company and define the agreed upon share of renewable electricity purchased. The trading company is used to simplify filtering your list of agreements in the portal. Entering percentage share of renewables opens up additional functionality in the report Sustainability. Finally, specify the currency of your agreement so that the system can make the appropriate calculations.
The next step is to re-create the cost items specified in your agreement. Prices are version controlled, which means that you can update your prices in perpetuity. For example, you signed an agreement with a fixed monthly subscription fee 2017-01-01. Specify the agreement's start date as 2017-01-01 and enter the prices from that date and forward. The latest price of a cost item is used until further notice.
N.D.: 2015-01-01 is the earliest date for agreements and prices in the module.
The final step is to link the agreement to meters and/or properties. How to do this is described in the introductory article. It's important that you know which meters to link the agreement to. That there exist main meters, virtual meters performing different calculations and/or sub meters of sections of the property is probable. To which of these the agreement is connected depends on your needs for financial analysis.
Consult with your Customer Success Manager if you have any doubts!
Create standardized agreements
If you instead wish to use Mestro Portal to get a rough estimate of past and future electricity costs, you can create a standard agreement or choose Mestro's standard. The simplest version is to use the variable cost item Average cost (currency / kWh) and set an estimated price per kWh. If you wish to estimate the distribution of variable and fixed costs, add a fixed cost item that estimates the monthly or annual subscription fees.
Finally...
We are a developing company and welcome your opinions and feedback. Do you miss a feature or can something become even better? Contact your Customer Success Manager or support@mestro.com - we want your concrete feedback so that we can make Mestro more useful to you!
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